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Google Slams Viacom For Secret YouTube Uploads
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Google, Inc. accused Viacom, Inc. of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday."
As "statements from the corporate counsel's office" go, this post on the YouTube blog is pretty hot reading.
Google has become quite outspoken. I guess they are big enough that they do not have to scratch anyone's back anymore. I like this approach - Google has the power to change people's perceptions of companies (and countries) seeing as how they do control a large chunk of the flow of information on the Internet.
If Viacom wins there isn't anything that cannot be bought.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
I always suspected lonelygirl15 was actually Andy Rooney. This seems to confirm it.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
This story illustrates a whole new sort of corporate stupidity. I propose from now on that such an action should be known as Viacomming, drawn from a new verb. To Viacom. Definition - to stab yourself in both feet by litigating against your own principal shopfront.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Captain Renault: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" ."
Croupier: "Your winnings, sir.
Have gnu, will travel.
"As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement."
The problem isn't that Youtube doesn't know who uploads stuff, but that they can't tell if the person that is uploading stuff is authorized to do so.
At the very least they'll have copies of the requests from Viacom to restore the videos that Viacom demanded be taken down, and most likely Google required that those requests state exactly why Viacom has the authority to make that video available. They also probably traced the IP addresses, odds on more than a few times somebody slipped up and uploaded videos from an IP traceable to a machine belonging to Viacom or one of it's marketing companies. The marketers have no dog in this fight, if Google's gone to them with apparent proof that they've been uploading Viacom's videos the marketers won't have any qualms about pulling out their authorization from Viacom to cover themselves.
Google hires some pretty good lawyers. I doubt they'd be making such a strong statement in a legal action if they didn't already have what they needed to back it up.
but it is difficult to believe a corporate legal counsel would post something like that if he could not prove it six ways to Sunday. Indeed, while I am not a lawyer, I would think that Google has grounds to counter sue. As a PR person I am embarrassed for my profession.
you misunderstood; posting an xkcd link is the "oops."
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Tonight I'm gonna sneak my TV onto my neighbor's yard, and then call the cops on him tomorrow morning.
Dirty thief!
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. ?
I'm certain at least some of those words were English, but those were not sentences.
Further - they cannot afford to do this sort of investigation on every single one of the millions of videos on Youtube.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/every-minute-just-about-a-days-worth-of-video-is-uploaded-to-youtube/
I imagine that they have only had the resources to investigate a sample of the alleged videos well after the fact.
Grandpa is starting to have moments like this.
Have gnu, will travel.
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Words...they fails me.
[FUCK BETA]
Never, ever screw with a company that's in the business of collecting information. Heck, that's Google's *ONLY* business.
The crunching sound you hear is viacom stepping on its own dick.
xkcd is painfully unfunny.
and you're painfully retarded. seriously, it hurts even to think about how retarded you are.
like, you're making Trig Palin look very, very smart by comparison.
This is the sort of shit that people who read xkcd find amusing.
Eh, there's a difference between reading it and finding it amusing ... and feeling a need to bring it up in every possible discussion and work it into every conversation, like some kind of obsession. I think what you're talking about applies to the latter and not the former.
Xkcd is pretty good, and for the most part I can appreciate its humor. However, it's not so good that I want to see it in every single Slashdot story. If anything, that's a great way to make me not want to read it. Turning something into another mindless meme is not a great way to promote it. This thread indicates I'm not the only one who feels that way.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Wow. Facts aside, this is the clearest, most straightforward legal/PR writing I've read in years. Makes the point with no dodging and evasion, no complicated jargon, it's short, clear, and on point.
Kids, if you ever wonder why English 101 is mandatory at your college, this is why: so maybe someday you'll be able to write like this.
http://definitions.uslegal.com/u/unclean-hands/
"The clean hands doctrine is a rule of law that someone bringing a lawsuit or motion and asking the court for equitable relief must be innocent of wrongdoing or unfair conduct relating to the subject matter of his/her claim. It is an affirmative defense that the defendant may claim the plaintiff has "unclean hands". However, this defense may not be used to put in issue conduct of the plaintiff unrelated to plaintiff's claim. Therefore, plaintiff's unrelated corrupt actions and general immoral character would be irrelevant. The defendant must show that plaintiff misled the defendant or has done something wrong regarding the matter under consideration. The wrongful conduct may be of a legal or moral nature, as long as it relates to the matter in issue."
If Viacom were just retracting their requests, Google's lawyers wouldn't be making the statement they did. It'd have to be one of Viacom's people writing Google saying "Hey, what happened to the videos we uploaded? The page says it was taken down because of a DMCA complaint.". And Google going "Oh reeeeeeally. That's odd, the DMCA complaint was from Viacom too. Left hand and right hand not talking much?". Followed by Google's lawyers getting together with Google's engineers to do a little data mining.
Viacom employees have made special trips away from the company’s premises (to places like Kinko’s) to upload videos to YouTube from computers not traceable to Viacom. See Schapiro Ex. 47 (158:2022); see also Schapiro Exs. 48, 49.
I think that if even Viacom can't get its act together and figure out which one of its own properties is supposed to be on Youtube, it's illogical to demand that Youtube should figure it out.
To get back to the example of the GP, the technical side of figuring out who uploaded something is entirely feasible. The problem is that that information has little to no bearing on whether that person was authorized by the copyright holder to upload the content in question.
I'm getting the impression that this is indeed nothing more that Viacom going on a legal fishing expedition. I'd love to see them slapped with a counter-suit, but am not holding my breath.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The old saying goes, "never get into argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel."
Maybe we should update it to say: never get into an argument with someone who writes programs that run on whole data centers.
In the supplemantary acticle, Google also alleges that Viacom hired 18 marketing companies to upload clips, and took steps to make the content look pirated. Viacom allegedly even sent employees Kinko's to upload clips, so Youtube couldn't trace the origin back to Viacom. I don't know what evidence they have of this, but if we give them the benefit of the doubt (that's a pretty specific bunch of allegations to simply invent), that would indicate some pretty clear malfeasance on Viacom's part. They were trying to poison the well and not get caught.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The real argument is that the DMCA safe harbour provisions should cover them. That coverage may be contingent on the practicality argument, and perhaps that is why the argument gets made. However in and of itself, being unable to afford to do something really buys you nothing in and of itself. If you can't afford to do something in a way compliant with the law then you just shouldn't do it. You have to have something more. In this case, it's the DMCA, and that is what the real argument is about.
That combination right there is going to be very powerful, and there are at least two arguments to be based on it: first, if even the copyright owners can't figure out what material is supposed to be there, how are we expected to do so? A followup offer might be "Your honor, if you'll instruct Viacom that they must allow Google and its legal team to index and have access to all of their internal communications and financials, we'll use that information to remove only the Viacom-owned items that Viacom didn't upload or cause to have uploaded."
The second argument could easily be that Google made a strong effort to remove copyrighted materials but that their efficiency in doing so was severely degraded by Viacom's uploading materials in ways that effectively contaminated the identification of infringing materials. Remove all the red ones! OK, here they are. Whoops, I really meant all the red ones except this one, that one, that other one, the one over there and maybe a few more. And how are we supposed to know which ones you want removed? Figure it out yourselves or we'll sue you for one billyun dollars!
fencepost
just a little off
Because when you get sued for a bajillion dollars by someone who wants to own you, it pays to go back throught you servers' IP logs and see if you can find exactly where all their copyrighted content actually came from. Gee, will you look at this; a lot of it comes from these 18 marketing firms. Hmm. They all list Viacom as a client. That's odd. And Kinko's? Hmmm. (Subpoenaing user CC information for workstation abc at Kinko's xyz on day/month/yr/time ... comparing to Viacom org chart ... *exact match*!)
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
So does this mean that Viacom is out?
Xkcd itself made a (slightly oblique) comment on this, when he criticized people who found amusement in quoting line after line, verbatim, from Monty Python. They're great, but it's a weakness in creativity to endlessly repeat the same funny lines. That type of rote mimicry is exactly NOT what made Monty Python great in the first place.
Douglas Adams receives the same treatment.
Never, ever screw with a company that's in the business of collecting information. Heck, that's Google's *ONLY* business.
No kidding, can you imagine the resources Google's legal team has to build a case. It's not just the support they get for customized searches of case law. They can get a report of all search terms used by Viacom's legal team. They can see every page loaded that's using adsense. God forbid if viacom is using gmail, google docs, or google voice.
I really take perverse pleasure in imagining Google serving customized goatse ads to Viacom's legal team. "Oh I'm sorry our advanced algorithms determined based on your browsing history that it was relevant to your interests"
No need for car analogies here because it's typical of what every person involved with sales do. Offer the thing to everybody, but always claim it's not really for sale, it's too precious to sell.
Like when you go to a used car lot and the salesman tells you he cannot hold that car for you unless you close the deal right then and there, because there are so many people ready to take that car at a much higher price.
> Figure it out yourselves or we'll sue you for one billyun dollars!
That is exactly the situation Google would be in were it not for the DMCA Safe Harbor clause (except, of course, there would be no YouTube. And no low-cost Web hosting. And no blogs.)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If these allegations are true, it is the very definition of unclean hands...
And people wonder why we need net neutrality. This should shine a bright light into why it is so needed.
I think Google's figured out that for a company where information is it's primary commodity (and trading in such), that the free flow of information is in its best interest. Basically the gains they'd make over taking ownership of data the hold would cost them too many of their own customer base. Being trusted, basically, is good for their business model.
As long as that's remembered, Google's movements are actually pretty predictable.
I don't see what Viacom has to gain over this, long term.
As for The Daily Show and Colbert Report, I'm not sure why people would go to YouTube to watch them anyway, since you can already watch them for free on the shows' web sites
For given values of 'you' where 'you' is a person with a US IP address.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's only true of humans and some higher animals. Many lower forms of life do have a bone in there. And Viacom execs are nothing if they're not a lower form of life...
thedailyshow.com and colbertnation.com work fine from Germany, with moderate advertisements (30 seconds before the full show, mostly for other comedy central shows). Where can't you access those sites?
They also work fine in Japan. However, when I was in France on a trip, I got the "this content is not available in your location" message. So some locations are blocked off, but it's not just non-U.S.